What Does Ezekiel 41:3 Mean?
Then he went inward, and measured the post of the opening, two forearms; and the opening, six forearms; and the breadth of the opening, seven forearms.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Then went he inward, and measured the post of the door, two cubits; and the door, six cubits; and the breadth of the door, seven cubits.THE KEY
The way inward is not an abstract plunge: even its doorway has a measurable breadth.
THE MEANING
You meet the inward passage as something shaped and measurable: a post, a door, and a breadth are named. The entrance into the inner space has a real boundary, and its width is made visible.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that inward depth is vague and boundless is undone: the way inward has a post, an opening, and a measured breadth.
THE ROOT
פֶּתַח
petaḥ
GROWS FROM
פתח
To open; to make an opening.
“the opening” in this verse is petaḥ. The word translated “door” carries the sense of an opening. English names the object, while the root also holds the action that makes passage possible.
ALSO GROWS
pātaḥ: To open.
פָּתַח
The verb gives the doorway its action: it is an opening made passable.
maphtēaḥ: Key; an opener.
מַפְתֵּחַ
This branch also grows from opening, showing how the doorway is defined by the passage it allows.
רֹחַב
roḥav
GROWS FROM
רחב
To be broad; to make room.
English makes “breadth” sound like a bare dimension, but this root also carries the sense of room and spaciousness. The doorway’s width is not only counted; it is language for the space available to pass through.
ALSO GROWS
raḥav: Broad; wide.
רָחָב
The adjective makes the opening’s measured width part of the same language of spaciousness.
Reḥovot: Broad places; room.
רְחֹבוֹת
This name shares the root of “breadth” and connects the doorway’s width with the language of making room.
THE PATTERN
A threshold gives passage a shape: it has an opening, a boundary, and a way through.
And for the entering of the innermost room he made doors of olive tree; the lintel and side posts were a fifth of the wall.Open the gates, that the aligned nation which keeps what is steady may enter in.I am the door. Through me, if anyone enters, he shall be delivered, and shall go in and out, and shall find pasture.THE THREAD
And he pulled up from there, and dug another well, and over that they did not strive. And he called the name of it Rehoboth, the wide places, and he said, For now the LORD has widened a place for us, and we shall bear fruit in the land.The doorway’s breadth comes from רחב (raḥav, “to be broad; make room”), the same root in רְחֹבוֹת (Reḥovot, “broad places”). The measured opening therefore carries the language of spaciousness: inward passage is given room.
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